Her thighs closed around his wrist and she squirmed.Her sharp little noises took on a desperate, pleading quality that sent Hal’s pulse thundering.His cock was so hard it ached, straining in his breeches.
For the first time, he regretted the endless physical labor that had hardened his muscles and roughened his hands.She was so unbelievably soft at the melting heart of her core, weeping prettily against his fingertips.With agonizing care, he skimmed a finger around the small, tight entrance to her body while his thumb found the hooded bud at the top of her cleft.
The pulse at the base of her throat leapt under his tongue.Hal felt a wolfish grin bare his teeth.He opened his jaws softly against her neck, holding and claiming her as his hard thumb brushed gently, delicately, against the side of that tiny knot of nerves.
Gemma jolted in his arms, a thin cry leaving her lips as her fingers tangled in Hal’s hair and held him to her while she shook.
Primal triumph surged through Hal’s blood.He’d made her come undone.The satisfaction of it took his breath, despite the desperate throbbing ache of his prick.He could ignore it, though, with all his attention consumed by the bewitching creature in his arms.
She unclenched her thighs and let her hands smooth down his neck to his shoulders.A subtle tension had built in her limbs where they were twined together, and Hal frowned.Gently withdrawing his hand from beneath her skirts, he set her away from him.“Are you all right?”
All he could see was the top of her bent head and the tight slope of her pretty shoulders.“I’m perfectly well.Perfectly perfect, in fact.Only I don’t want to look at you and see…oh bother.Should I assume the same rules apply as last time?We shall pretend this didn’t happen?”
“Until the next time it happens?”Hal clarified with a slight grimace, brushing his hands down her arms.He didn’t like to hear the hesitation in her voice, the uncharacteristic tremor of uncertainty.“Gemma, look at me.Whatever it is you fear to see, I promise, all you’ll find is a man who is ready to admit that he can’t seem to keep his hands off you.”
“Yes.Against your better judgment and your sense of honor.”
He tipped her head up with one hand under that sweetly dimpled chin.The way she bit her lip caught at his heart, but it was the shadows of remembered pain in her eyes that nearly ended him.
“Gemma—”
“You don’t need to say anything more,” she interrupted, giving him a bright smile that didn’t dispel any of those shadows.She bent to retrieve her coat from the ground and shook his briskly to rid it of dirt.“Let’s take your regrets and recriminations as read, shall we?”
Shaking her skirts into place, she started to march off, head held high, until Hal grabbed her hand and stopped her.“Stop, Gemma.No recriminations, I promise.And no regrets.This may not be the wisest course of action, for either of us, but I can’t bring myself to regret anything that feels so…”
“Sogood.”The fervency in her voice made Hal grin, and when she glanced up and saw it, she blushed through an answering smile.
Against all odds—against his better judgment and certainly against his sense of honor—Hal felt invincible.Like a giant.He also felt hungry enough to snap Gemma up in two big bites if he let go his tight grip on his control.With a grimace, he adjusted the front of his trousers and when Gemma caught him at it and gave him a cheeky grin, he grinned back and let her look.
Let her see what she did to him.He could give her that much, at least.
He only wished he could give her more.So when she peeked up at him from beneath her thick, dark lashes and suggested perhaps they could tour the manor house now, Hal couldn’t find it in himself to deny her.
They’d keep to the public rooms, he reasoned.There wasn’t much to see.It wouldn’t take long for Gemma to tire of the tour when all the furnishings and paintings were covered in heavy Holland cloths.
But reason was no part of the emotion that blindsided Hal as he escorted Lady Gemma Lively up the stone steps to the imposing arched door of his family’s ancestral home.
Without intending to, he realized he’d held his breath all along the walk up the overgrown pathways through the terraced gardens.He’d seen with new eyes the tangled weeds and wild shrubbery and held back a wince as he compared it to his memory of the orderly, manicured boxwood-lined lanes and regimented rows of flowers he’d hidden in as a child.
“It’s simply gorgeous,” Gemma said thoughtfully as she studied the rambling building set into the wooded hillside like a jewel in a crown.
Hal gestured up at the façade.“The main part of the house dates back to medieval times, when the first Duke of Havilocke was granted the land and the hand of the thane’s daughter as part of an attempt to sow peace between the Normans and the Saxons.”
Gemma clasped her hands.“How romantic!”
“Not really.”Hal arched a sardonic brow and leaned a shoulder against the sun-warmed stone.“The Saxon thane had held this land for twelve generations, until the male line failed and gave the king an opening to install a knight loyal to himself.That knight, Geoffrey de Montrose, started the grand family tradition of coming to marriage penniless and expecting his wife’s fortunes to restore his own.A tradition that has continued even into the present generation.”
“Gracious.You make the family sound like such scoundrels.”
Hal became aware of the intensity of his manner and attempted to tone it down a bit.“Not many around here would deny that, although they might choose a harsher word.The duke’s father was not cruel, but he was not an attentive landlord either.And the elder son, the last duke…he took and took and took from these people until there was nothing left.It’s not a family legacy to be proud of.”
But all that ends with me,he vowed silently.
Straightening, he shouldered open the heavy door and led Gemma into the cool darkness of the entryway.The gracefully soaring ceiling lent an air of cavernous space to the unused rooms.
Gemma wrinkled her pert nose as she took off her bonnet.“It’s so musty.Does no one ever come here?”
“The current duke shut the house up when he inherited from his older brother almost a year ago,” Hal said carefully.He hated lying and had never been very good at it.He figured it was best to stick as close to the truth as possible.
